A Million Junes Page 2

  “Is that . . . a moderately attractive stranger?” I finish Hannah’s thought. “The most elusive legend in all of Five Fingers?” Hannah doesn’t seem to hear me. “Han? Do you know him?”

  Mandy Rodriguez, who graduated two years ago, grabs the boy’s arm and pulls him into a hug. Something along the lines of good to see you passes between them, and Hannah releases one crack of laughter before red splotches rush into her cheeks. “Not exactly.”

  The boy turns to wave as Mandy and her friends move off toward a cart selling fried-dough elephant ears. In that moment, his face becomes fully visible.

  Unmistakable.

  “Oh my god,” Hannah gasps. “It is. It’s him.”

  “Saul Angert.”

  The buzzing I felt back at the gatehouse swells within me now. It’s not a hornet or a bit of darkness circling me. It’s everywhere, everything. It’s Saul Angert. Saul Angert, and the fact that he shouldn’t be here.

  And that I definitely shouldn’t be here with him.

  Three

  “HOW long has it been since anyone’s seen him?” Hannah asks.

  “Three years,” I answer automatically.

  “Right,” Hannah says. “Of course.”

  Three years ago everything changed for the Angerts, like ten years ago it changed for my family.

  I was about to start high school, and for the first time since second grade, he and I were going to be in the same building. We’d spent the fourteen years prior avoiding each other, and, barring a few brushes, we’d done a good job.

  I was nervous to see him on a regular basis, but a little excited too. My parents had never been the rule-setting type, so the more they drilled into my head that I must, at all costs, stay away from the Angerts, the more I obsessed over keeping tabs on them. I wanted to know everything about the people I wasn’t allowed to know. Saul and his twin sister, Bekah, were my personal forbidden fruit, the one thing in Five Fingers I could never touch.

  “God, why do you think he’s back?” Hannah says.

  I shake my head. The snag in my throat returns. At this point, it’s more like a double knot.

  “Maybe Santa got my letter,” Hannah pans, then shoots me an apologetic smile. She’s had a crush on Saul for nearly as long as I’ve been under strict orders to avoid him.

  One of my earliest memories is of Dad perching me on a stool in our summer-warm kitchen and telling me about the Angerts—what they did to the O’Donnells way back before I was born, how they still treated us. And, most importantly, what happens when we cross paths with them. I have dozens more memories like that one, snippets of panic and curiosity whenever I spotted one of them at the grocery store or in our elementary school’s bus lane, fear and embarrassment when we met at the neighborhood pool and I watched Dad’s face storm over.

  Hissed insults in parking lots.

  Ignorant backwoods dick, from Saul’s father, Eli.

  Elitist asshole, from Dad.

  Yanked arms and hasty retreats.

  Slammed doors and peeled tires.

  Even years after Dad was gone, Mom dragged Shadow and Grayson away from the Cone’s walk-up window, milkshake-less, when she saw Bekah Angert working the register.

  So I spent much of the summer before freshman year mentally preparing myself to get regular, prolonged, and up-close looks at the supposed face of evil. But when my first day came, Saul wasn’t there.

  “We should go say hi,” Hannah says timidly, like not even she believes that. She knows the sordid saga of the O’Donnell/Angert feud, but as with most things that cause her displeasure—spiders and peplum tops and that Richard Harris song about the melting cake—she tries to ignore it.

  “Hannah, no.”

  When the bus dropped me off after my first day of high school, I wandered toward the Angerts’ summer cabin. I watched from the woods as Saul trekked in and out of the front door, carrying taped-up cardboard boxes and milk crates full of records. He looked less solid then than he does now; he looked wilty and tired.

  “I was seriously starting to resign myself to never seeing him again,” Hannah forges on.

  That was what I’d thought three years ago: that the packed car meant the Angerts were leaving town. But the next day a group of upperclassmen—Mandy Rodriquez among them—marched up to my locker and asked if I was the reason Saul had transferred last minute. It turned out he was going to spend his senior year at boarding school, the pretentious arts academy two hours south of town.

  The news traveled fast, and by lunch everyone was speculating that Mandy was right. People paid attention to what our families did. They knew about the bad blood, and the pains we took to avoid each other, because, for all intents and purposes, Dad and Eli Angert were local celebrities: Dad for the cherries and general magic surrounding our house, Eli for a series of boring-ass man-vs.-nature novels the New York Times had lauded, and the both of them for the roles their ancestors played in the founding of Five Fingers.

  I understood why Saul’s friends would think Eli had yanked Saul out to keep space between us, but it was impossible to be sure. After all, the Angerts had had their own Very Bad Thing happen a few months before, and even from a distance, I could see the family slowly falling apart. A few weeks before Saul left, Rachel, his mom, had ditched her job as the school nurse and moved to Chicago without his father, who—much to Mom and Toddy’s displeasure—moved full-time into the summer cabin that bordered our property.

  Weeds had quickly overrun the once magnificent garden, beer bottles and cans had piled up on the front porch for weeks, newspapers had lain at the lip of their driveway getting soggy, and when someone knocked the mailbox off the post, Saul’s father hadn’t bothered to fix it.

  I expected things to settle down and Saul to come home, at least for the summer. But he didn’t, and, after art school, he left for Vanderbilt without so much as a weekend home first. Then I resorted to tracking his movements through covert Google searches, history cleared on the off chance that Mom or Toddy ever used my computer. A year ago, Saul turned up in a “10 Under 30” feature New York magazine ran. Six months ago, I watched Toddy angrily stuff the local newspaper into the kitchen trash can, and when I fished it out, one of Saul’s terrible junior high yearbook photos stared back at me alongside a piece alerting Five Fingers that its very own Saul Angert had sold an untitled book of essays to Simon & Schuster. I’d been watching for it to pop up online or in bookstores but never heard another peep about it.

  Three years, and in all that time, he’d never come home. And yet now here he is. Standing a few yards away near a pile of puked-up popcorn, as if he never left.

  “It’s a miracle,” Hannah says hazily. “A back-to-school miracle.”

  Or a tragedy I’ve brought on with the sheer force of my curiosity. My mind flashes to the darkness I saw undulating across the gatehouse earlier.

  The nameless thing is gone, was never there. You imagined it.

  “How long do you think he’s here for?” I say. “I mean, he can’t be staying, right?”

  “I have no idea, Junie.” Hannah’s voice strains under nerves and excitement. “That’s why it’s essential we hang out with him tonight.”

  A thrill of curiosity and panic shoots through my stomach. “Hello? Hannah? It’s me, June, your best friend who’s forbidden from interacting with him.”

  “I know, I know!” she cries, glancing between me and the group below the Ferris wheel. They’ve rearranged again so that Saul’s facing our direction, and I jerk my gaze away before he can catch me looking at him. “But,” Hannah begins, “this is quite possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Don’t act like you’re not curious.”

  “You know what curiosity did to the cat.”

  “Convinced it to help its shy cat-friend woo her childhood crush?”

  I laugh despite myself. I can’t blame Hannah for trivializ
ing my family’s feud with the Angerts. Even Mom used to roll her eyes at Dad when he did things like steer us away from the shore and back to the car when we turned up for a beach day only to find the Angerts there. Backing out of the parking lot, Mom used to sigh in exasperation as Dad mumbled under his breath: Think they’re better than everyone, just ’cause they paid thousands for a piece of Ivy League paper and some froufrou shoes. Before he died, we stayed away from the Angerts only because Dad did. But after, I think we all started to wonder if he’d been right: if the Angerts’ hate for us really did somehow cause our bad luck.

  It wasn’t just us who said it. The whole town did—maybe just for fun, but they said it. Once, when I was in middle school, I even overheard a teacher explaining it to a substitute in the lounge: The families hate each other so much that when tragedy strikes one, fate lashes out at the other. And when they cross paths? Well, they don’t. And for good reason.

  But Hannah would never hear of it. Bad things happen, June, she’d say. They just do. To everyone.

  “Pleeeeeeeease.” she says now, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Let’s just say hi.”

  “Hannah, my mom and Toddy have literally two rules: no swimming at Five Fingers Falls and no Angerts. You know this.”

  She squeezes my arm and says, “Sorry. I get it. I do. I’ll just have to be happy knowing that, in another universe, the one where your family doesn’t hate Saul’s, we’re having a lot of fun tonight. You, me, Saul, and”—she pauses, tipping her head toward the Ferris wheel—“Nate.”

  I look over, and as if on cue, Nate spots us. He waves with the unfettered ferocity of someone stranded on a desert island trying to catch the eye of a chopper flying past.

  “Are you kidding, Hannah? You just dreamed up another universe and you made Nate Baars my unofficial date! You could’ve chosen anyone!”

  She laughs and waves back. “He’s not that bad,” she says. “Besides, he’s Saul’s cousin. He’s the whole reason I know Saul.”

  “Know is a pretty strong word for someone you’ve never spoken to. Aloud, I mean.”

  Hannah waves off my comment. “You used to think Nate was super cute.”

  “In the fifth grade!” I say. “He didn’t have that walk yet.”

  “Oh please, since when aren’t you into boys who walk like they just dismounted a horse after fifteen hours of riding bareback?”

  “He probably has chronic hemorrhoids.”

  “Junior,” Hannah says reproachfully, and I know she’s serious because she never uses my full name. Or, at least, my fuller name. Despite my being a girl, my full name is Jack O’Donnell IV, after my father and his father and his father’s father, who apparently got his name because he was the spitting image of his father’s father’s father, Jonathan “Jack” Alroy O’Donnell, pioneer settler of Five Fingers and purveyor of magic cherries.

  Mom used to call me Jackie, but Dad always called me Junior or June. After he died, everyone else started to too. “Oh my God!” Hannah grabs my arm again. Her face is reddening rapidly. “They’re coming over here. I’m so sorry—I think I just willed that to happen. Oh my God, am I a witch?”

  The tension in my throat snarling again, I glance over my shoulder. The Ferris wheel group is disbanding, but Nate and Saul are distinctly headed in our direction.

  “Shoot,” Hannah says, as if she weren’t just begging the universe for this exact scenario to unfold. “He’s actually coming over here! What do we do?”

  I search for somewhere to hide. Hannah, realizing how actually terrified she is to talk to her forever-crush, also searches for somewhere to hide. I book it toward the House of Mirrors, and she chases after me. I spin back to her, my heart jarring at the realization of what I’m about to do. “Wait.”

  Hannah stops short, wide-eyed, and I glance toward the entrance, the spurt of adrenaline from seeing Saul spurring me on. “I want to go in alone,” I say, and Hannah’s face twists with worry. “You want to talk to Saul; now’s your chance.”

  She and I lock into a staring contest. I can practically see the debate happening in her mind. “Hannah. You can do this. You can talk to him.”

  She shoots another glance over her shoulder and takes a deep breath. “Okay. Okay, go.”

  I kiss my pointer and middle fingers and hold them out to her. Hannah does the same, our two fingers meeting in the middle like a tiny high five. “When I get back, be ready to tell me which song you chose for your wedding processional.”

  Hannah’s eye roll evolves into a grin, and I turn and step into the dark, where everything becomes me.

  Four

  THE room glows neon. Blues, purples, pinks cross-fade along the edges of mirrors, and so do the versions of me they reflect. The whirring of the fans dulls the screeches and giggles of the other people hustling through the maze as I take my first steps.

  I come up against an unexpected pane of glass, then veer right. As I move, I allow myself to forget where I’m going, like Dad used to do—he loved to lose himself first. Then, only when he was sure we were in the epicenter of whatever maze he’d led us into, he’d make a plan and swiftly guide me out.

  “When you’ve been as lost as I have,” he once said, “you get good at finding your way home, June-bug.”

  I feel him in the whip of the fan-stirred wind. Like he’s rustling my hair, egging me on. By the time Jack the First was your age, he’d tell me, he’d flown across the Atlantic with Amelia Earhart, gone over Niagara Falls in a rubber ball, and climbed Backbone Mountain to catch a falling star. By now, Jack II had saved dozens from drownin’ in an Alaskan mega tsunami, using only a sliver of glacier for a rowboat, a broken pine for an oar, and a box of cherries for medicine. By your age, Junior, I’d stopped a tornado with a matchbook and a glass factory.

  I turn into a new room, all semblance of laughter and chatter fading. Blue-green arches frame the mirrors here, and swipes of glow-paint on the floor create the illusion of ornate tiles. This, I decide, must be the epicenter.

  Channeling Dad, I become more purposeful with my turns, but when I change directions I come up against cool glass, and my breath catches in my chest. I laugh off my surprise the first few times it happens, but eventually my lostness, my aloneness, starts to unnerve me. It’s been too long since I’ve seen anyone else.

  And I keep remembering that outside these walls there’s an Angert, and Bad Things happen when an O’Donnnell crosses paths with an Angert.

  Bad Things happen, and I’m locked in a glass labyrinth with no escape.

  I stumble forward and collide with another mirror. My pulse quickens. I try to calm myself, try to keep moving.

  Another collision.

  Keep moving. I turn and jolt to the left.

  A pane of glass stops me. I spin right.

  Keep—

  I slam hard into someone as I turn the corner, barely managing to stifle a scream.

  “Shit,” someone—a boy—gasps. In the strand of neon green light, I see his hand clutching his collarbone. Either my skull or my teeth just slammed into it, but apparently I’m too high on adrenaline to feel any pain.

  “I’m so sorry!” I stammer, moving forward with my hands held out apologetically. “God, I’m sorry. I thought you were—”

  He looks up, the light slanting across his face.

  Saul Angert.

  That’s who I’m looking at. Who I just bit. Saul “If You See Him Dying on the Side of the Road, Keep Going” Angert.

  He raises one hand and massages his clavicle with the other. “It’s fine. You were right. I was.”

  “—the ghost of Jack the Ripper.” The words escape like air from a tire.

  “Oh,” he says. “I thought you were going to say, having a complete meltdown about being trapped in this god-forsaken nightmare.”

  My heart hammers against my ribs. “No. The vibe I got was definitely J
ack the Ripper.”

  His laugh is gravelly and warm, so at odds with his coolly rigid appearance. His dark hair is cropped close on the sides and a little longer on top, pushed back in a smooth swoop away from his forehead, and now that I’m closer I can see the minor imperfections that keep his face from being perfectly symmetrical: the slight turn of his right canine tooth and the lone dimple on his left cheek. He takes a half step back. “Well, I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “Oh please. I scared myself. I’m sorry I bit your collarbone,” I reply. “If it helps, it’s super unlikely I have rabies.” Despite what you might have heard.

  Although if he knew who I was, would he be standing here?

  He gives me that scratchy laugh again. “Oh yeah. Right. I’m not sorry—you are. That’s what I meant to say.”

  “I was just being polite,” I say. “I feel no remorse.”

  “Wow,” he says with mock disbelief. “Stone cold.”

  I tip my head down the mirrored aisle. “Most of me is made of glass, so.”

  “Most of you are made of glass.”

  “I feel like if you’re not in uniform, you’re not allowed to police someone’s grammar.”

  When he smiles, his mostly straight white teeth glow blue along with his white T-shirt and pale arms, except for where his tattoos cut inky shadows through the light. He is handsome, in a way. Just not my way, which is usually either (1) brawny pseudo-lumberjack types whose personal hygiene regimen amounts to a lone spray bottle of Febreeze or (2) NOT SAUL ANGERT.

  It would be best for me to walk away now. I know that. But I’m standing face-to-face with someone I’ve heard about my entire life, Googled regularly for at least three years, and never, before now, spoken to.

  And I haven’t burst into flames. The ceiling hasn’t collapsed, the earth hasn’t opened to swallow us, and he’s acting pretty . . . normal.

  Which, I assume, can only mean that he doesn’t recognize me. Did not Google me.